


Gnasche

by dirtbag



Category: Dorohedoro
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-21
Updated: 2020-01-21
Packaged: 2021-02-24 19:02:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22342873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirtbag/pseuds/dirtbag
Summary: It’s not like Shin to back down from a challenge, but he probably would’ve picked a different bill to skip out on if he’d known that Flower Smoke had this kind of security.
Relationships: Noi/Shin (Dorohedoro)
Comments: 28
Kudos: 229





	Gnasche

**Author's Note:**

> **gnasche**. n. the intense desire to bite deeply into the forearm of someone you love.

Shin’s stomach is full and his arms still itch with residual magic. He keeps flexing his fingers, glancing down at them and then glancing again because it’s so strange to see them whole—still segmented by rows of messy stitches, but no longer actively rotting away. 

He’s thrown off guard, which isn’t good; the guy who’d chased him down this alley has already demonstrated that he’s a powerful magic user. Most likely a bruiser, too, if the full suit of armor is anything to go by. 

Shin’s heart pounds as the guy shifts into a wider stance, metal scraping against stone. He gleams in the sun, face completely hidden. It’s not like Shin to back down from a challenge, but he probably would’ve picked a different bill to skip out on if he’d known that Flower Smoke had this kind of security. 

“Well?” the guy demands. His voice echoes and distorts inside the helmet, but he sounds younger than Shin would’ve expected. “What are you waiting for?”

Shin wants to stay and fight, he really does. He even wants to go fair and square, like the guy had said, but he has more important things to do today than get busted for stealing ramen. Not that he doesn’t think he could take this guy—he’s just pretty sure the two of them would cause a big commotion if they really got into it. 

“Sorry about this,” he says, stepping up lightning-fast, and cracks his hammer hard against the side of that helmet, twisting cruelly where it bites into the metal. 

He’s not expecting a blow like that to kill the guy, but it’s still a bit of a surprise when he gets right back up after only a few seconds. The guy is already yelling after him by the time Shin gathers enough presence of mind to run away, sounding none the worse for wear. 

Healing magic, Shin reminds himself as he tears off down the street. His own arms are a testament to it, newly whole and no longer stinking in the summer heat. 

Shin looks down at them one more time and smiles, nearly colliding with a pile of garbage bags as he skids around a corner. He’ll definitely have to find that guy again, figure out a way to pay him back that’s at least a little better than a hammer to the head.

— — —

“You still have to remember my birthday,” Noi is saying when Shin tunes back in. He’d been lost in thought, something that happens too often these days when they’re together. “And don’t let En get too comfortable in that stupid mansion. And if you take a girl out for lunch, eat normally! Don’t play any weird tricks on her.”

“No promises,” Shin says mildly. One of Noi’s sharp elbows flails out to catch him in the ribs. 

They’re sitting side-by-side on a low wall not too far away from Flower Smoke, being lazy after lunch. The sun beats down on them from a cloudless sky, baking Shin’s back in his too-big suit. 

Noi seems comfortable, kicking her feet against the bricks and every so often scratching at the base of one of her tiny black horns. They’re still shocking to see, rising out of her salt-colored hair, and part of Shin wants to ask about them—if they’re always itchy, what it’s like to be so close to the full transformation. 

Part of him feels like asking will make it too real. As Shin reminds himself grimly, over and over, that part is the stupid part. 

No matter how real or unreal he can manage to make the whole thing seem to himself, the fact of the matter is that Blue Night is fast approaching and soon his only friend in the world will be gone, maybe forever. He still hasn’t managed to bring himself to say anything about it, apart from noncommittal responses to the long list of demands she starts in on whenever there’s an idle moment between them. 

“Yes, promises,” Noi retorts sulkily. 

Shin files away the response in his head. He wants to be able to detect a shift, some difference in her besides the changes to her outward appearance. There’ve been some, maybe, but Shin doesn’t think he’s known her long enough to gauge the full extent of them. 

Then again, maybe knowing her has little to do with it; En remarked once over dinner in tones of despair that Noi acted half-devil long before she ever started training. 

Now that it’s almost over, this close to Blue Night, she may as well be one already. At least, that’s what Shin keeps telling himself. It’s the only way he can think of to steel himself for the time after she’s gone. 

He realizes too late that he’s paused too long before answering her, and now she’s turned her attention from a beetle on the trunk of a nearby tree to focus fully on his face. He waits for her to ask what’s wrong with him, or tell him something else he needs to promise, but she does neither. 

Instead, she jumps lightly down off the wall and moves to stand in front of him. Her wiry tail swishes back and forth like a cat’s.

“Let’s do something,” she says. “Like a going-away thing.”

It’s the first time she’s spoken about it in such plain terms, past listing out all the things Shin is or isn’t allowed to do in her absence. 

“Like what?” he asks warily. A going-away thing could be anything from an eating contest to making someone bleed for fun. 

She frowns, and scratches her horn again, and then her eyes light up like she has a plan. Shin is suddenly moderately concerned. 

“We’ll fight!’ Noi says, tail swishing faster. “No magic, just like that time we were supposed to before you brained me.”

She says the last part reproachfully, not making any reference to the fact that that had been the first time they’d ever met, but Shin can see the symmetry of it. He appreciates it, in a way, even though it also opens up a cold pit in his stomach. 

“Okay,” he says, getting up off the wall as well and stretching his arms out above his head. His shoulder’s a little stiff from his last job, but hardly anything to turn down a fight over. “Might as well.”

Noi doesn’t even bother to respond before she rushes him, eyes intent.

Five minutes later, after she’s knocked him on his ass and he’s trying unsuccessfully to staunch the torrent of blood flowing from his nose, Shin thinks maybe he shouldn’t go along with Noi’s plans so easily all the time. 

Noticing his predicament, Noi crouches down in front of him, peering with interest at his bloodied face. 

“Bad luck,” she says, grinning. 

That’s all the warning he gets before she takes his face in her hands and tilts his chin up, blowing a stream of healing smoke right up his nostrils as he scrunches his eyes shut against the sun. He stays like that a second longer after she pulls away, eyes closed, trying to memorize the feeling of that moment in case there’s never another one like it again. 

“Let’s have lunch again tomorrow,” he blurts out as Noi gets to her feet, shaking out the hand she’d decked him with. 

She wipes sweat from her forehead as she turns to look at him, the surprise in her expression almost immediately giving way to excitement. 

“Yeah! Let’s celebrate the first day of Blue Night! You’re treating me, right?”

“We’ll see,” Shin says, getting up to face her. Just as she’s opening her mouth to reply, he sneezes three times in rapid succession. 

When Noi ducks out of the way, yelling with outrage, the laugh Shin lets out is genuine.

— — —

They fall off the cliff, and Shin thinks he might pass out for a while on impact. When he comes to, his ribs hurt like a bitch and blood runs freely from a gash in his temple.

He feels lightheaded, dazed with pain, disoriented to the point that it takes him a while to figure out whether he’s lying down or sitting up. It takes him even longer to figure out that he’s alone, even though Noi had definitely gotten tossed over the edge right along with him. 

Shin winces at the memory. They’d made mistakes—a lot of them, the kind they shouldn’t be making with how strong they both are, the kind they’ll never hear the end of once En finds out about all this. 

It stings, too, because Shin believes in their partnership. He knows he and Noi are a good team, and the thought that En won’t give them a chance to smooth out their growing pains makes him feel vaguely panicked. 

There’ll be no way for them to grow together if they end up having to be scraped off a cliff face, so Shin summons up his energy. 

“Noi?” he calls, trying not to wheeze afterwards. He’s pretty sure he punctured a lung, on top of the head wound and at least a few broken bones. 

He exhales slowly, pulling himself into a sitting position. The blood at his temple is starting to dry and crust, stiffening his hair and filling his nose with its scent. His mouth is full of it too, and he spits on the ground as he pulls himself to a stooped standing position, most of his weight balanced on a good-sized boulder he’d luckily managed to avoid smashing into. 

Noi is still nowhere to be seen, but Shin can feel that she’s nearby and alive thanks to the freshly signed contract tucked between his aching ribs. 

The devils had said that their sense of each other would sharpen as time went on, become clearer and more precise. For now, Shin doesn’t feel it as anything more than a vague notion of where she is at any given time, a tug of awareness that doesn’t actually feel too different than before. 

In this situation, it’s not exactly helpful in determining her precise location, but it does feel good to know for a fact she isn’t dead. Not that something like this would ever kill her.

It takes several long, unpleasant minutes of walking before he sees her. She’s tangled up in one of the scrubby brushes littering the cliffside, attempting to free herself with blood in her hair and dirt smeared across her cheek. 

“Senpai!” she says once she sees him. She starts to exhale smoke the second he gets close enough, but it’s nowhere close to the usual billowing cloud she lets out when they get seriously injured like this. 

For a moment, Shin is confused. Then he has to fight back a groan as he puzzles through his vague, adrenalin-addled memories from earlier. Some feral-looking guy charging at Noi, all but ripping her arm off with the force of his attack, and Noi laughing so hard Shin could hear it in snatches over the hoarse yelling of the man his hammer was currently buried inside. 

He’d looked over just in time to catch a glimpse of her bone healing itself, muscle and skin growing back over each other like sped-up decomposition in reverse as her assailant took a faltering step backward.

Shin had gone ahead and finished him off, thinking nothing of it, until a van pulled up with a fresh wave of goons and Shin realized they were already working off their last reserves of energy. Now that his murder-brain has mostly gone offline, he’s starting to think they may have approached this job from the wrong angle. 

By the time Noi’s smoke cloud dissipates, Shin no longer feels a stabbing pain on every exhale, but he can tell she’s reached her limit. 

“Alright?” he asks, reaching down to help her out of the bush. He hauls her upright, lifts her arm over his shoulder. She sags heavily into his side. Her suit is in tatters, just like his. 

“Yeah,” she replies, sounding sheepish. Shin feels her discomfort in the air, pressing down around them, though he’s not sure whether it’s a symptom of the contract or of Noi being totally unable to conceal her emotions. Either way, this kind of mood really doesn’t suit her. 

Shin looks around, trying to search out a path that will lead them out of this dusty little canyon in the middle of nowhere. After a few moments, he sets off in what he vaguely thinks might be the direction they’d left the carpet, still shouldering most of Noi’s weight. 

She’s quiet as they limp along, head tilted forward so that all Shin can see of her is a tangle of pale blood-matted hair. She’s letting it grow out again, but she never bothers to comb it the way she did when they were younger. 

“Noi,” he says, before he even realizes he’s going to say anything. 

Even if he’d had a thought, she wouldn’t have let him finish it out, turning to face him right away and gripping his shoulder tight. 

“Senpai, I’m sorry! Please forgive me!”

Shin slows to a stop even though they’re nowhere near the carpet. Noi’s brows are furrowed into a familiar determined frown. 

“We lost because I wasn’t strong enough,” she presses on. “But I’ll train even harder when we get back, so—”

“It’s not _that_ ,” Shin says, hoisting her a little closer on instinct and then feeling pointlessly embarrassed about it. He starts walking again, tries not to think about whether the contract would amplify her perception of things like that too. “It’s about saving energy, maybe dodging every once in a while. It’ll come with time.”

Noi’s quiet for a few more seconds, like she’s considering his words carefully. 

“Dodging’s boring,” she eventually pronounces. “And if we had more energy we wouldn’t need to save any.”

She laughs as she says it, and instead of feeling irritated all Shin can muster up is relief that she seems to have taken at least the first part of what he said to heart. 

“Yeah, tell that to En.” Shin thinks he might see the carpet off in the distance, still a ways away. “He’ll stick us both on garbage duty.”

Noi scoffs. 

“No way,” she says. “We’re partners for good. If En doesn’t want us anymore we can defect to somewhere else, or take him down from the inside, or—”

“Just keep walking,” Shin interrupts, in the vague hope that his brusque tone will do something to disguise the warmth blooming in his chest, creeping across his face. 

If Noi notices anything, she doesn’t mention it either way. Instead, she just quiets down with a happy little hum that means she’ll think of something else to start going on about momentarily. The two of them trudge back towards home together, kicking up dust.

— — —

“Noi,” Shin says, with what he considers to be the patience of a saint. “You can’t stay here.”

Noi, sprawled out across his pillows in a pair of his sweatpants and a commemorative T-shirt that came with the box set for Haru’s last album, gives no indication that she’s heard him. Because he’s a traitor, GuraGura is curled up by her feet, snoozing peacefully. 

“Get up,” Shin tells her, shaking futilely at her arm. “Go kick someone else in your sleep.”

He sees her bite the inside of her cheek, clearly trying not to laugh, but her eyes stay dutifully shut. Shin can’t even toss her off the bed like he did last week, because last week she’d somehow goaded him into wrestling on the floor and one of En’s lackeys had to politely inform them that there’d been a complaint from the room below. 

He glares at her for a few more seconds, hoping the force of it will somehow radiate through her eyelids, and then he admits defeat and goes to brush his teeth. 

Alone in the bathroom, Shin is forced to contend with the fact that he doesn’t actually dislike sleeping with Noi. She only kicks a little, and she never says anything about it when he presses his face groggily between her shoulder blades first thing in the morning, and it’s possible that he very slightly enjoys the routine of making her a cup of coffee before he goes on his morning run. 

Shin spits toothpaste into the sink and splashes some water on his face for good measure, shaking his head slightly. 

When he steps back into the bedroom, Noi looks like she’s actually passed out, face calm and serene in a way it rarely is in daily life. GuraGura has unfolded and stretched out in his sleep, a dark mass covering the entire foot of the bed. 

Shin climbs in next to Noi, pressing his feet against GuraGura’s bulk through the comforter until he shifts to accommodate Shin with a disgruntled whuff of air. He’d been thinking about watching TV or something, but now that he’s in bed he’s already getting drowsy, surrounded by warmth on all sides. 

Before he reaches over to turn off the bedside lamp, he takes a look at Noi. There’s a stray lock of hair falling against her cheek, and Shin tucks it back behind her ear without even thinking. He lets his hand linger there for just a second, smoothing it down carefully even though he knows it’s just going to spring right back out of place.

That’s the other problem with letting Noi sleep in his bed. He gets way too sentimental when he’s tired. 

Shin takes his hand away, flexes his fingers until the stitches start to twinge in protest and then makes a fist. 

“Goodnight, Noi,” he says, quiet enough not to wake her up, on the verge of turning off the light and falling back against what little pillow real-estate she isn’t already hogging. 

Then, with horror-movie slowness, Shin watches as a pleased grin begins to sneak its way across her features. 

“Goodnight, senpai,” she says, pulling the covers up so only her eyes and the top of her head are visible. Even so, Shin can hear in her voice that she’s laughing.

Shin, rendered momentarily speechless by a potent mixture of surprise, embarrassment, and annoyance, makes a strangled noise and pushes her off the bed. Part of the comforter slides off with her, quickly followed by the rest of it once GuraGura gets excited by the commotion and leaps down as well. 

“Sleep on the floor if you want to stay in here!” Shin fumes, turning his face resolutely away so she won’t see how red it is. 

Unfortunately, that means he also doesn’t see her reach out to grab hold of his ankle, yanking him right down on top of her so that he lands with a thump. 

The comforter is tangled hopelessly around them, and GuraGura is getting so hyped up that he’s definitely about to knock something over, and Noi’s hair is in his mouth. She wraps her arms around him, still laughing, and Shin can’t tell if she’s trying to embrace him or put him in a chokehold. He suspects she doesn’t know either.

“I didn’t mean to embarrass you,” she says, holding him tighter. “You were just being really cute.”

Shin tries to convince himself that his heart is hammering this hard because he’s angry, but even in his head it’s not convincing. Before he can even begin to formulate a response, someone clears their throat.

“Ah, please excuse the interruption,” says the lackey standing by the door, looking like they’d rather be anywhere but here. 

Shin can relate. He’s off of Noi in a flash, but he knows the damage is already done. 

“We’ve had some complaints—”

“Sorry about that!” Noi interjects cheerfully, not bothering to get up. “Won’t happen again.”

“Thank you,” says the lackey, sounding supremely relieved that no further action is required, and slips silently back out the door. Shin locks it behind him, cursing himself for not doing that in the first place. 

When he turns back around, Noi is sitting on the edge of the bed, stifling a yawn as she rubs GuraGura’s belly. 

“We should get some sleep,” she says. “We’re sparring tomorrow, remember? And I’m not going easy on you!”

“Same to you,” Shin manages, bending to gather the bulk of the comforter into his arms. 

Noi sounds totally normal now, like the atmosphere from earlier was some spell that’d been broken by the lackey’s surprise appearance. That is, if he hadn’t just imagined it all in the first place. 

That hypothesis lasts until they’re both back in bed and Shin is most of the way to sleeping, when her voice comes unexpectedly out of the darkness. 

“You know,” she says, so quietly Shin almost doesn’t catch it. “You can touch me when I’m awake, too.”

Shin stays very still. He knows he could just keep his eyes closed until he falls asleep for real, pretend she never said anything, and she’d never know the difference. 

With equal certainty, he knows that he won’t. Shin exhales softly and rolls over to face her, reaching out.

**Author's Note:**

> i realized a full year after posting this that i made noi use magic in the scene thats set during the period where she is literally not allowed to use magic in canon........im not gonna change it but just know that i feel ashamed


End file.
